Unpacking Local Food: Three Essays on Consumer Definition, Motivation, and Geographic Variation

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Huang, Chiu Lin
Graduate Program:
Energy, Environmental, and Food Economics
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Document Type:
Dissertation
Date of Defense:
February 06, 2024
Committee Members:
Katherine Zipp, Program Head/Chair
Edward Jaenicke, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Martina Vecchi, Major Field Member
Yizao Liu, Major Field Member
Katherine Zipp, Outside Field Member
Chloe Tergiman, Outside Unit Member
Keywords:
Local Food
Organic Food
Lab-in-the-Field Experiment
Information Treatment
Urban-Rural Differences
Non-Hypothetical Willingness to Pay
Abstract:
This dissertation is a collection of essays that relate to local food in different forms. Essay 1 addresses what factors affect consumers' definition of local food and, in turn, how their definition affects their willingness to pay for local food. In this study, we conduct an online survey with 509 respondents from the Mid-Atlantic region in the U.S. and Washington State. We find that consumers who identify local with increasingly larger geographic scales generally have lower willingness to pay for local food. Consumers who prioritize national policies rather than global are more likely to define local food with a broader, more national, definition of local. Moreover, we also find that people who have had experiences of COVID, especially those who have personally been infected, are willing to pay more for the local food compared to others who haven't had such experiences. Finally, we find that the rural-urban spectrum matters, as consumers who live in urban areas are willing to pay the most, followed by those who live in suburban areas. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment, in Essay 2, we investigate how providing information about food miles and pesticide residues influences willingness to pay (WTP) for potatoes among 407 shoppers in Taiwan, split between a supermarket and a farmers market. Initially, local organic potatoes have the highest average WTP at NTD73, followed by imported organic at NTD67, local non-organic at NTD48, and imported non-organic at NTD42. When we introduce information about food miles, the WTP for imported organic potatoes decreases by NTD10.2, without significantly impacting other varieties. A different information treatment featuring pesticide residue information boosts the WTP for local organic potatoes by NTD8.3 but has no significant effect on the other categories. Providing both types of information diminishes the local premium for non-organic potatoes while enhancing it for local organic varieties. The influence of the information varies by shopping venue: farmers market shoppers give more weight to food miles information, whereas supermarket patrons are more responsive to pesticide residues information. Essay 3 aims to examine how different definitions of “local” influence the non-hypothetical WTP for local and non-local potato chips among supermarket shoppers across varying rural-urban landscapes, and to investigate whether there are any significant differences in WTP for local and non-local products between rural and urban settings. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in the parking lots of supermarkets located in rural (Huntingdon) and urban (Altoona) areas in Pennsylvania. The results indicate that consumers’ WTP for local potato chips does not vary significantly between two definitions of local: one that defines local as being produced within the state of Pennsylvania, and another that defines local as being predominantly sold within the state. These findings suggest that future research on local food can feasibly use the “predominantly sold within” definition, which is highly compatible with supermarket scanner data. Rural shoppers demonstrate a lower WTP for both local and non-local potato chips compared to their urban counterparts. Both rural and urban shoppers exhibit a premium for local potato chips, with rural shoppers showing a higher premium than urban shoppers. However, this difference in local premium between rural and urban settings is subtle and not statistically significant.